Jai Rawat

Professional career

Rawat began his professional career at LSI Corporation in 1993 as a software engineer where he helped create some of the most advanced Electronic Design Automation tools.

Rawat started his first company, Obongo with Samir Palnitkar in 1999. Obongo was an online identity management service offering single sign-on, eWallet and email spam control. It soon attracted a lot of attention from the top silicon valley investors and was funded by Sequoia Capital. Obongo generated a reach of over 40 million users before getting acquired by AOL in 2001.

As a senior executive at AOL, Rawat led the teams driving AOL's online commerce and mobile strategy.

In 2003 Rawat co-founded another company, AirTight Networks. AirTight provides secure Wi-Fi solutions and is being used by hundreds of businesses such as Pinkberry, Garden Fresh, John. C. Lincoln Hospitals, and MTA New York City Transit.

Rawat then decided to help other startups and became an executive consultant or advisor to many technology companies. These include TheFind.com, BuySight (acquired by AOL), Nimble Commerce, Trackle, Nanolane, Vividha and Story Truck.

Rawat then went on to start another company, ShopSocially in 2009 and is currently the CEO of ShopSocially.

Rawat has also been very active in several non-profit organizations promoting entrepreneurship and mentoring others. He has been a charter member of The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) since 2003. He also chairs TiEcon, which is the largest conference in the world for entrepreneurs. Under his leadership TiEcon was recognized as a top 10 conference in the world on ideas and innovation along with TED and World Economic Forum. TiEcon speakers include Marissa Mayer, Vinod Khosla, Sal Khan, Deepak Chopra, Sam Pitroda and Steve Case.

Rawat was also the president of IIT Kanpur Alumni Association for a number of years and was also a founding member of Pan IIT organization.

Background and education

Rawat was born in 1969 in a small village in Rajasthan, India. Despite the lack of proper resources, he ranked 29th in the nation out of a pool of 100,000+ applicants and got admission into the most prestigious engineering college in India, IIT Kanpur (which was established under a US Agency for International development program called the Kanpur Indo-American Program or KIAP). Rawat got his bachelorís degree in Computer Science from IIT Kanpur and then came to USA to get his master's degree in Computer Science from Iowa State University. He got married to Jyoti Rawat in 1993 and had 3 kids, Rishika, Yashvi, and Rohan.

Recognitions

Rawat has been awarded 17 technology patents for the innovative work he has done in his startups.

In 1999, he received the Leadership Award for Excellence and Promise in Business and Technology in 1999 from Siliconindia. Only 10 people of south Asian origin were selected worldwide for this award. Other awardees included Vinod Khosla and Narayana Murthy.

In 2003, in recognition of his success, he was selected to be a charter member of TiE.

He also received the IIT Kanpur Leadership Award in 2010, a highly celebrated recognition by his alma mater.

Rawat was also featured in "Jewels of India", a coffee table book highlighting successful Indian-American businessmen.

Appearances

Rawat has given numerous talks on the subjects of entrepreneurship and social media. These include a talk at Wharton business school, keynote address at various conferences, interviews and panel discussions at various events and more. Here are some of his talks/interviews:

Patents